What is Ethnic Studies
What is Ethnic Studies?
Ethnic Studies is an intellectual and political project that uses inter- and multidisciplinary approaches to understand and transform enactments of power, to which, in the modern era, productions of race and ethnicity have been central.
We understand “race” as a dynamic ideological and institutional framework through which exercises of power and oppression as well as struggles for liberation and self-determination are articulated and enabled. “Ethnicity” refers to a group identity based on a presumed common ancestry, language, history, and cultural practices.
The aim of the Ethnic Studies curriculum is to provide students with an understanding of the historical processes (including slavery, capitalism, genocide, colonialism, nativism, war) that form the United States as a nation-state and as an imagined community, and their differential impact on diverse communities within local, national, and global contexts.
Ethnic studies critically attends to research methodologies and frameworks of knowledge in order to examine how these legacies impact access to political power, allocate economic resources, and influence cultural expression. We understand that dominant Western modes of inquiry in the sciences and humanities constrain what kinds of questions we ask, what kinds of studies we pursue, and how we interpret phenomena. To challenge these constraints, Ethnic Studies courses draw from and engage with a number of academic fields, including: post/decolonial studies, cultural studies, human rights studies, Indigenous studies, migration studies, legal studies, environmental studies, gender studies, sexuality and queer studies, and science and technology studies.
Through a critical and comparative study of interlocking and intersecting systems of oppression embedded in the formation of the U.S. nation, students develop a greater understanding of the legacies of racism, discrimination, and inequity in the United States as well as of the movements for social justice. Students also learn about diverse peoples of America, specifically Indigenous Peoples, Latinx, and the African and Asian diaspora who have been historically displaced, disenfranchised, and silenced.
Emerging as a challenge to the university as an apparatus for reproducing relationships of power and rooted in decolonizing movements in the 20th century, Ethnic Studies seeks to provide a relevant education—one that has a deep commitment to justice, equity, and social and institutional transformation.
Pedagogy
Within individual courses, our faculty incorporate high-impact approaches to engaging with course content and concepts. Courses like “Beyoncé: Race, Feminism, and Politics” bring together popular cultural texts that students know so well with critical and materially grounded understandings of larger topics like race and politics, black feminism, and cultural production. With these courses, students take what they have learned and produce a culminating campus event presenting both creative and critical works. A number of faculty incorporate service learning or community-based learning projects in their courses, bringing the classroom to the community and the community into the classroom.
Part of the pedagogical design of the degree program is to create an intellectual community, especially for a relatively small cohort of majors, so that there are more opportunities to be engaged with the ethnic studies content and concepts at a higher level. New CES majors are blocked into a smaller section of ES 1112. They then take ES 1114 together, a recently designed course where CES majors learn about the history and origins of the Ethnic Studies movement. More advanced CES majors then take a series of theory seminars together, which allows them to deeply engage with critical concepts for undertaking research projects, including their senior project.
The Senior Project is completed over two semesters where students critically and comparatively examine research and fieldwork methods before determining their own research methodologies. The senior project represents the culmination of the program, with students designing and implementing their own research projects and applying the content and concepts learned from their ethnic studies coursework.
A key pedagogical approach of ethnic studies and our department is inter- and trans-disciplinary methods and engagement with the limits of disciplinary formations and with institutional and academic reproduction of power and the empowered. The courses and the program design more broadly address research and learning through different frameworks, providing critical perspectives and analysis on communities and identities that are too often overlooked or not understood.
Hear from our alumni, faculty, and supporters who share what Ethnic Studies means to them.